Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I will take your word, Senator Humphries. Here we are with the longest break in this period of the year that there has ever been with any government. We have a six-week break and we are now in the last couple of hours of this time before the break dealing with 25 pages of most complex amendments to a most complex piece of the discussion.

This did go to a committee. Senator Birmingham, Senator Fisher and I were on that committee, as was Senator Ludlam. The majority report came out and of course the majority of the committee is government-Green alliance, so they recommended you go ahead, with some amendments. The coalition senators had a different view. The hearing of this legislation typically showed that Senator Conroy’s legislation was full of holes; it did not hold water. The deals that had been made with Telstra and others were not accounted for in this legislation. So we had to have a whole new set of amendments. I have not seen the amendments. They only came out yesterday afternoon. I have been doing other things. I have not had a chance to look at them. I assume the other parties have, the stakeholders, but I certainly have not had an opportunity to deal with them. I hear around the traps that a couple of the so-called stakeholders are not very happy about the ability of NBN to enter into the retail market. Who knows? Already Telstra have said that their extraordinary general meeting that was going to be held by 1 July has now been postponed to September. From what I hear around the traps, it may not even be approved then. It simply demonstrates the fact that this whole NBN fiasco is just that, a fiasco. It is in shambles and as each day goes by people are more and more understanding that this is legislation that is completely wrong, is not well thought through and does not achieve the results that anyone thought, and yet we are going to have to try and debate it in the next couple of days.

I am surprised that the Greens are going along with this. I happen to know that, at the end of last year just before the Victorian elections, Senator Brown did not want to hang around the chamber because he wanted to get around and bask in the glory of the Greens victory in the Victorian election. Remember that?